The dramatic changes experienced by the South over the past 150
years have challenged deeply rooted values, beliefs, and
institutions and shaped the region's complex and tumultuous
history. These challenges, and the southern response to them, are
the focus of this book. Presenting sixteen essays selected from
more than eighty presented at a recent conference on the South, it
provides an interpretive re-examination of five major topics in
southern history. These are the impact of Reconstruction, the
development of racial attitudes, the debate over secession,
southern economic development, and the use of literature as an
instrument of self-criticism and analysis. The first chapter
surveys interpretations of the Reconstruction era and analyzes it
in terms of the extended historical process of adjusting to the end
of slavery. Several essays trace some of the ways in which racial
attitudes have affected the evolution of southern society from the
colonial era to the present. Among the topics considered are the
defense and support of slavery by the southern religious
establishment, the impact of African-American culture on the early
Ku Klux Klan, the experience of desegregation, and the stereotyping
of blacks. Addressing the question of secession, the next group of
essays examines the varying responses to the issue in different
southern counties and states. Chapters on southern economic
development discuss women's roles in the colonial agricultural
economy, postbellum developments in agricultural labor, and the
lives of two individualistic southern entrepreneurs. The final
chapters examine the efforts of southern writers to understand the
southern experience and to tell the story of the South in fiction
and popular history. Including the contributions of many leading
historians, this work offers fascinating new data as well as
significant reinterpretations in several major areas of southern
historical scholarship. It will appeal to scholars, students, and
other readers concerned with southern, African-American, and U.S.
history.
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